The Miners' Hymns

The Icelandic composer's score for Bill Morrison's film about coal mining in northern England will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue.

Jóhann Jóhannsson's The Miners' Hymns is the instrumental soundtrack to Bill Morrison's dolefully spare documentary about the history of coal mining in northern England. As such, it will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue. Composed for brass ensemble, organ, and a light scrim of electronics, the album takes you places that are woefully ill-suited to early summer; it feels perfect for a grim, drizzly late autumn, when wet leaves are choking gutters and the air carries the threat of pneumonia. This might not be the most inviting sound world to contemplate, but Jóhannsson's confident touch with it is powerful, and The Miners' Hymns creeps into your consciousness like a musty attic draft.

Jóhannsson builds the album's six pieces out of a series of low tones echoing faintly across a distance, like ships through fog. Extended periods of charged silence separate each burst. The structure is firmly "EVENT-pause-EVENT"-- a meek cluster of sound, an evaporation of echoes, a blank band of dead space. The effect is like slipping pebbles in a pond, watching the ripples distort your reflection, and then waiting for the surface to clear. Jóhannsson's pacing with this material is patient unto funereal, and occasionally the music appears to be just hanging there. But train your focus on it, and you will sense the slowly darkening atmosphere. The lonely horn figure of "Freedom From Want and Fear", for example, gathers weight with each repetition, so that when it blares, halfway through the track, the contrast registers like a flash of heat lightning.

The album was recorded in a Durham cathedral, and Jóhannsson has given the music a distinctly liturgical feel-- the descending bassline in "There Is No Safe Side But the Side of Truth" mimics the groaning sway of Renaissance sacred music. And when two sourly whining quarter tones give way to a gorgeously warm brass chorale in "The Cause of Labour Is the Hope of the World", the album's final track, it feels like an epiphany, a generous flooding of light that casts a backward glow on all the gloom and pallor that preceded it. Suddenly, the album's mood retroactively shifts. It's not a bleak autumn record; it's a halcyon autumn record, bathed in inviting half-light. I am reminded of playing basketball at dusk, and that imperceptible moment when you just can't see anymore and everyone reluctantly heads inside. It's a quietly exhilarating "hallelujah" that depends entirely on the previous 45 minutes of buildup for its weight, a nice reminder that some things are worth sticking it out for.